Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew Talks America's Strengths And Weaknesses

Both in the United States and abroad, many influential observers argue that the U.S. is in systemic decline. Not so, says Lee Kuan Yew, the sage of Singapore. Lee is not only a student of the rise and fall of nations. He is also the founder of modern Singapore. As prime minister from 1959 to 1990, he led its rise from a poor, small, corrupt port to a first-world city-state in just one generation.

Today, Singapore’s six million citizens have incomes higher than those of Americans. He has served as a mentor to every leader of China since Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s march to the market, and every American president since Richard Nixon has sought his counsel about the U.S. role in Asia. In the pages of Forbes and elsewhere, he has consistently emphasized America’s resilience. Here is how he summarized that judgment to us when we interviewed him in May 2011:

America will not be reduced to second-rate status. Historically, the U.S. has demonstrated a great capacity for renewal and revival. America’s strengths include an ability to range widely, imaginatively, and pragmatically; a diversity of centers of excellence that compete in inventing and embracing new ideas and new technologies; a society that attracts talent from around the world and assimilates them comfortably as Americans; and a language that the lingua franca of those who rise to the top of their own societies around the world.

Lee cites America’s “can-do approach,” “entrepreneurial culture,” and “great urge to start new enterprises and create wealth.” He notes the primacy that Americans accord to the “individual’s interest,” which makes them “more aggressively competitive.” Uniquely among analysts of national competitive advantages, perhaps because he speaks both English and Mandarin, he gives great weight to the comparative ease of learning English rather than Chinese. Indeed, he boldly suggested to one of China’s leaders that China adopt English, rather than Chinese, as its first language—as Singapore has done.

In Lee’s assessment, demographics are also an increasingly important factor. Noting that America’s total fertility rate of 2.0 exceeds that of most western European countries as well as that of its chief challenger, China, he recently observed that “the U.S. could become the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world” this century. Thus, he believes that “America will remain the sole superpower” for at least two to three more decades.

Nonetheless, Lee is frank in describing what he considers to be fundamental problems with U.S. government and culture. It has been unable to tackle its exploding debt, he asserts, because presidents do not get “reelected if they give a hard dose of medicine to their people.” In a social-media-fueled era of 24/7 news, furthermore, those who prevail in elections are not necessarily those who are most capable in governing, but those who can present themselves and their ideas “in a polished way.” He doubts that such contests “in packaging and advertising” can produce leaders in the mold of “a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a de Gaulle.” Instead, he laments conditions in which “to win votes you have to give more and more. And to beat your opponent in the next election, you have to promise to give more away.”

Lee warns about the growing risk of America’s losing its “self-help culture” and going “the ideological direction of Europe.” If it continues that slide, he says bluntly, “the U.S. will be done for.” He also gives U.S. immigration practices a failing grade, declaring that “multiculturalism will destroy America.” The key question is: “do you make the Hispanics Anglo-Saxons in culture or do they make you more Latin American in culture?”

Lee sees the 21st century as a “contest for supremacy in the Pacific” between the U.S. and China. In his view, “America’s core interest requires that it remains the superior power” there. But he worries about America’s ability to sustain its strategic focus. About the Obama administration’s much-touted, recent “pivot” toward Asia, this observation of his comes to mind: Americans think of international relations like a movie, imagining that we can hit the “pause” button when we focus elsewhere and push “play” when we return to Asia. But “it does not work like that. If the United States wants to substantially affect the strategic evolution of Asia, it cannot come and go.”

Weighing all of the pros and cons, Lee is still not selling America short. He is betting that despite seemingly overwhelming current economic challenges, “America’s creativity, resilience, and innovative spirit will allow it to confront its core problems, overcome them, and regain competitiveness.”

Graham Allison is director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Robert D. Blackwill is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Ali Wyne is an associate of the Belfer Center and a contributing analyst at Wikistrat. They are coauthors of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World, published Feb. 1 by MIT Press.

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